1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to intelligent switching of languages in a text-to-speech system, and more specifically to switching languages based on specific circumstances and needs of the speech recipient.
2. Introduction
Text-to-speech systems convert text into speech by looking up phrases, words, or phonemes from language-specific databases based on user settings. For example, a text-to-speech system for an English speaker first identifies English sounds which correspond to text using a database of English words, then combines the identified sounds into a speech output in English. Similarly, a text-to-speech system for a Spanish speaker identifies Spanish sounds corresponding to text, then combines the sounds into a speech output in Spanish. Certain multi-lingual text-to-speech systems operate by identifying foreign language words within text, then searching for pronunciations of those foreign language words in a database separate from the “standard” language for the remainder of the text. Similar text-to-speech systems can be used for domain-specific topics, where the text-to-speech system searches the text for domain-specific words which are found in a domain-specific database.